Personal blog, IT related and misc other stuff.

Category Archives: Hardware

In my effort to learn about electronics and mechanics, I decided it might be nice to build a CNC mill.

So here I go – I bought three stepper motors and a stepper driver board (sooner or later I want to be able to replace that, obviously) plus transformer.

While surfing the web for inspiration how to build the table, I stumbled upon Werkstattonline.ch by Dave. He basically did in a few hours what I want to do in the next few weeks 🙂

I wrote him a few lines -Â primarilyÂ about sourcing the components. Thankfully, he responded quickly and gave me some hints where to look.

Current state: Looking for (cheap) rigid couplings and other parts to build the “table”. Stepper Driver case assembled, emc2 is set up – still some issues with the real time kernel though.. my stepper motor seems to stutter a little. I am thinking about getting myself a cheap old pc, with 32bit Windows XP or the like.

As you may have read, I’ve bought a Logitech Harmony 885. Now the remote is good, but one single button does not seem to work: the Channel Up button. So what do we do? We test, try, let the remote learn IR commands and almost resign. But how can you be sure your remote does not a wrong command but doesn’t send any command at all?
Simple: Get you digital camera out and take some pictures:

As a video on youtube show, it has been done. The Xbox 360 is hackable and has been hacked. Now the BIOS has not been flashed yet – the hack shown is using a hacked DVD drive using a modified Firmware. All you need to hack is a Firmware writer, but sooner or later you will get either hacked drives to buy or pre-hacked xboxes I guess – see you on ebay!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyZQ4k7Bi-8

Ars Technica reviews the Logitech Harmony. Since I own myself since a couple of weeks, quite interesting to read if I am the only one with having some issues with it. But: All in all I am all happy with my investment (should have bought the more expensive one though – I need RF, mine features only Infrared).

2 HDMI In, 1 HDMI Out, more than enough Digital Optical in, multiple Component in (for when I get my new PS3/Xbox360) and more. The best thing about this nice piece of hardware is its tiny microphone you get. With Yamaha’s “YPAO” microphone you can ‘Auto-Setup’ you speakers – the difference between no tuning and the auto-setup is truly amazing! The only thing I am missing is an iPod dock, but I’ve got a long RCA cable so I don’t mind..